Simon Jenkins: Roads will be risky for cyclists whatever we do

Recent cyclist deaths are tragic — yet in a city in which cycle use has shot up, fatalities are not disproportionate

Tuesday 19 November 2013 11:42 BST

When one cyclist dies on the streets of London it is an accident. When two die it looks like carelessness. When six die in two weeks, “the Mayor must act”. Must he?

How any city uses its streets is peculiar to its culture. It is also surrounded with myth. At present London is being portrayed as a death trap for cyclists and its Government could not care less. The response is typically British. More public money should be spent, more rules introduced, more penalties imposed.

The truth is that barely 10 per cent of the 118 cycling deaths in the UK last year were in London. Most occur on rural roads. While cycle use has risen since the onset of recession, London fatalities are fairly constant, 10 in 2010, 16 in 2011, 14 in 2012 and 14 so far this year. This is hardly the carnage or massacre that the headline writers claim.

Fans of the new series of Borgen on Saturday night will have noticed the streets of Copenhagen seemingly awash in cyclists. Yet none of the riders was wearing a crash helmet. Nor do they in Amsterdam. In these capitals of urban cycling the most elementary safety equipment is not used.

This appears to make little difference to the accident rate. Cyclist-friendly Copenhagen has had seven fatalities at junctions alone this year and Denmark has roughly double Britain’s overall cycling deaths per head of the population. On the other hand this is just half as many as Britain when measured against “cycling kilometres”. You can take your choice. In Britain a bicycle is just half as dangerous as a motorbike.

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I used to cycle in London. On a fine day it was invigorating and exhilarating. The ride home across Regent’s Park was sublime, but on a wet day it was miserable and plainly dangerous, culminating in an accident that made me stop.

Most alarming in retrospect was that I began to treat the street quite differently from how I used it as a pedestrian or a driver. I became contemptuous of its rules and regulations and particularly hostile to London’s red light regime. The long static phases causing traffic to back up for minutes while acres of street lay empty ahead. This stupidly antiquated traffic management was an open invitation to cyclists to jump the light. So too was the lack of any left-turn-on-red with pedestrian priority, as in most American cities. Even count-down clocks, long used abroad and even in Islamabad, have only recently been introduced in parts of London.

As a result I began to take a mischievous delight in jumping lights, weaving over zebra crossings and scootering the wrong way down one-way streets, veering onto pavements should anyone approach. It was the only moment I felt I could grasp ludicrously bureaucratic London by the throat and toss it in the gutter. For a while I was a macho London cyclist.

The debate over cycling safety has become a dialogue of the deaf. London cyclists regard drivers as killers and themselves as an oppressed class. Drivers regard cyclists as thrill-seeking bandits, taking ever wilder risks and blaming drivers for every accident.

The drivers have a point. Quite apart from the blatant red light jumping, which cyclists regard as a sort of rite of passage, the failure to enforce bike lights have turned many nocturnal streets — and especially park roads — into death alleys. Clouds of cyclists weave through traffic that can hardly see them. Junctions are lethal since drivers must watch traffic lights, dazzling at night, and can hardly see half-hidden cyclists to side or rear.

Public money has been tipped into London cycling. The Mayor’s £11 million a year bike scheme is the most expensive in any city in the world. Paris’s similar one actually delivers the city a profit of up to €8 million a year. Business is not the London Mayor’s strong suit. Boris bikes have sent thousands of often inexperienced riders onto the streets, at an average cost of around £1,400 per bike per year.

More separate cycle lanes, better lighting, better rear-view mirrors and reserved space at traffic lights might reduce accidents. But the good news is that cycling has indeed increased, probably the best safety measure of all. Evidence from Scandinavia suggests that more cyclists on streets means fewer casualties. Drivers may fume but more cycles does induce greater awareness among other road-users.

The only other remedy is a less self-righteous cycling fraternity. Cyclists are patently at greater risk than any other road user. They are mixing their travel not with pedestrians but with larger, faster and more powerful four-wheel vehicles, a contest they cannot hope to “win”. No driver to my knowledge wants to kill cyclists. But they confront fellow street users who are untrained, unlicensed, near invisible and moving slowly down what they claim as a road lane’s width to themselves. While side streets are less murderous, trunk roads and swirling roundabouts are accidents waiting to happen.

London has a strange cycling culture. Other Europeans find bizarre the Londoner’s helmets, goggles, Lycra, high-performance bikes and aggressive (mostly male) riding style. Borgen’s bikes, like those in Amsterdam, are mostly sit-up-and-beg, and drivers seem to treat them with more respect as a result. Perhaps that is why women have far fewer accidents than men.

But then wildcat cycling is a facet of London’s zany street culture. It is the citizen pitching anarchy against regulation, personal freedom against a draconian state. Like many freedoms, this one is dangerous — but not as dangerous as headlines suggest.